Nanimo nai wakusei means "empty planets" in Japanese and is an apt description for key elements of Tim Salden's music as Osoroshisa. It reflects the width of uninhabited and lonesome worlds and how time becomes a secondary factor on an empty planet that lacks any point of reference for perceiving its continuous passage. In the broader sense, it may also refer to isolated persons living in a solar system of their own, without a way of taking notice of other worlds apart from theirs and where chains of events have gradually been replaced by a constant train of thoughts. Accordingly, the music is located between drone and dark ambient without being particularly representative of either genre and evolves slowly, with recurrent figures weaved into persistent drones and subtle changes in modulation rather than thematic variation and progression.

Kasei ("fire star", Mars) as opener starts with a boomy drone of indecisive ninth and fourth intervals that lead to a choir like sequence. There is a distant similarity to the shoegazing sound of My Bloody Valentine, minus the rhythm section and vocals and recorded hundreds of metres away in the main concourse of a major railway station. In Dosei ("earth star", Saturn), a scifi movie soundtrack atmosphere is prevailing, perhaps due to the prominent use of vintage analogue synth sounds. Kinsei ("gold star", Venus), by far the gloomiest tune, pictures the hostility of overheated deserts with impenetrable tone clusters that barely lighten up towards the end. At first glance, Suisei ("water star", Mercury) - as closing tune of the album - seems to offer an resolution with emphatic swelling of ninth intervals, but too soon the faint glimpse of sunlight has to give room to gloomy darkness again, underlining the eremite's fate to return to the beginning.

Olliver Wichmann

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